Council tax will rise by 2.95 per cent this year to fund Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue – while fire chiefs are also expected to rubber-stamp a controversial plan to cut nighttime cover in Ashfield and Retford.

After the polling miss at the 2015 general election, many politicians and journalists loudly declared they would never trust polls again. Two years later, opinion polls have regularly been leading the election news. First they foresaw a Conservative landslide, including a resurgence in Scotland, and more recently they’ve pointed to a shock Labour fightback.

Trust in election forecasting is probably as low as it has been since 1948, when political polling suffered possibly its worst ever humiliation. In that year’s US presidential election, the 8-1 underdog Harry Truman defied all predictions to defeat his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey. “Dewey Defeats Truman” screamed the now-infamous newspaper headline printed before the actual votes were counted.

What causes terrorism? The combination of the horrendous terrorist attack in Manchester [and now, the attacks on London Bridge] and a British general election inevitably meant that this question would dominate political and media discourses. And so it has. Particular attention has, once again, been drawn to the role of western foreign policy, including that of the UK, as a driver of extremist violence.

Everybody was caught off guard when Theresa May announced Britain would be heading to the polls on June 8. But charities were more surprised than most by the news – which had an immediate impact on their day-to-day campaigning operations.